Rent Nixon (1995)

Difficult and drawn out - Nixon review by RD

You really need to know the story of Nixon's life before coming to this film, as the scenes are many and not easy to follow as the dialogue mentions characters by the dozen that are not quickly recognisable. Hence the meanings and relevance to the life of Nixon are for the main part lost on this viewer. The story quickly loses its aim and any clarity is also lost.

The film then becomes a series of scenes of Nixon's life, hopping backwards and forwards in time, and often with explosive outbursts, giving the viewer an idea of Nixon's demons, but with no real depth of story, especially as the dialogue is often undecipherable. Many of the scenes, especially when he was a young boy are so sentimental and shallow. And so it goes on until the welcome end of the film.

There are also some serious technical problems with this DVD, it dates from 1995 when US widescreen films often appeared in 4:3 format with black bars top and bottom, so that the picture shrinks nowadays to a small widescreen box in the centre of the screen with large black borders on all four edges in order to get the aspect ratio correct and natural. Selecting Zoom, Full, Natural and Auto options in the TV managed to get various pictures to fill the screen but always in a distorted aspect ratio which made viewing tiresome.

The two channel audio track (possibly in Dolby Matrix surround) is a good 10-12dB lower than any other DVD and our home cinema amplifier volume was wound up to unheard of levels just to hear the film comfortably. Both these problems are possibly indicative of early DVD production when mistakes were common, and from a time when widescreen was not yet popular in the USA.

Slightly uneven take on admittedly difficult subject matter - Nixon review by RT

Clearly, Oliver Stone comes at this with his own personal baggage in the form of the Vietnam War, and you can see how this affects the work.  It's a big, important story, but you can feel things dragging slightly.  The individual performances are all very strong, excellent even, but ultimately it feels less than the sum of its parts.  I found the cinematography slightly uneven also, with inconsistent use of black and white (not restricted to historical passages) and occasional over-rotation on the Dutch angle.  Good, but not great.